In an interesting discussion over at NamePros, the owner of the domain name Poets.net describes how her domain – registered at Register.com – appeared to forward random subdomains to parked pages controlled by the registrar.
We don’t own any domains at Register.com to verify this odd behavior.
This practice is called “wild-carding“; the capturing of any third-level domain traffic and its subsequent forwarding.
Read more at the NamePros thread.
Comments
2 Responses to “Register .com wild-carding domain DNS?”Leave a Reply
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Thanks for bringing this to light to the broader community.
I would urge everyone who has a parked page (as a redirct, not a DNS change) or as a google alias (ghs.google.com) to check your Register.com A Record. If you see “*.Example.com points to [Register.com’s “Future sites” parking page IP],” then your “non-existent” subdomains have been wildcarded.
I have verified (with some sample domains) that GoDaddy, Domainmonster, and Dynadot do NOT wildcard subdomains, although my internet carrier Verizon does fill non-resolving pages with an ad page.
I have only a few Register.com, and it will stay that way.
Again, thanks, Mr. Fabrice.
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By the way, these aren’t random subdomains; they are infinite–the * means “all,” which, of course, means that your domain, through no fault of your own, may be infringing on someone’s copyright–and on a parking page, yet!
Verizon.example.com
Ugh!
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